Russian Campaign mission 4 - hard times (spoilers)

[Sulman]

Having had lots of fun on the previous river crossing, this has been a bit of a cruncher for me. It's a change of pace from countryside to urban streets and parks - a bit of a flashback to CMBB.

 

The map is very cleverly laid out and is a bit of an LOS nightmare, but it's very easy to get eyes on the enemy, and to get troops concealed to the startline(s). The problem is getting fire on the enemy positions without being badly chewed up - once near the objectives so many eny positions have LOS it's a killzone. 

• Tough time limit - the first time crunch of the campaign, actually. 
• Heavy ECM environment means fire missions are painfully slow - this has proved decisive, it would actually be pretty easy with regular comms as I could move my FO about without too much trouble. 
• US seem to have fire superiority - Strykers with grenade launchers and at least one MGS.
• BTRs are made of papier-mache and sellotape, apparently.  
• Russian pixeltruppen again very hard to attack with (my fault, not the game).

 

I did a heavy bombardment right at the start to level the low buildings on the most forward enemy position, so I could get recon to see further in to town, which worked well, but actually moving units forward is murder. My base of fire (I was using the whole weapons platoon - 3 x MG and 3 x ATGM) got crippled by a lucky mortar strike - 2 MG squads got mauled on their start line by a direct hit from harrassment fire (they were hidden so it was just bad luck). My ATGM crews got hit badly when moving to what I thought were concealed positions in the park, but NVG's obviously got them. 

 

I got a breakthrough using BTR's with heavy suppressing fire but still lost 2 out of 4; luckily they got in a good keyhole and took out the Strykers trying to get LOS on them. 

 

The flanks look very tempting but fields of fire all favour the enemy, so I opted for a straight in breach after a huge bombardment. It's costly, but working so far. I don't think I'll manage the last objective, though - not enough time. 

 

Anybody find any good strategies? I think I may play this one over a few times. It's an interesting problem.